X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) – Not a Weasel, and Not Worth Watching

Did you know that the wolverine, aka Gulo gulo, is the largest land-dwelling species of the weasel family, known for its aggressive nature and stocky musculature? I’ve been under the impression that wolverines were known for their adamantium healing and rapid regeneration! Well maybe I thought all of this because the latter is the only Wolverine that matters! All other wolverines fail in comparison.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the first (and worst!) of the solo X-Man trilogy featuring everyone’s favorite non-Hemsworth Aussie hunk as the rough-around-the-edges loner with a heart of gold who’s the best at what he does (which isn’t very nice). The X-Men movies famously vary in quality, and, my sweet little chickpeas, I’m here to tell you that this is the bottom of the barrel.

There are a few things to like, here. Hugh Jackman is, as always, charmingly gruff as the cinematic wolverine, and he serves up two heaping helpings of eye candy in this flick because he’s freaking buff. So buff that men and women alike are looking at him and saying, “Holy shiitake mushrooms he’s huge!” Action Flick Chick likes this very much. 

There’s also the ever-loquacious (and ever-hunky!) Ryan Reynolds doing a beta test for the character he’d ultimately be able to fully realize in Deadpool. In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, however, he’s barely onscreen and the character ends up being turned into a weird, evil bald dude with his mouth sewn shut- a cruel joke the screenwriters played on “the merc with a mouth” and audiences alike. If this is what we had to suffer to get Deadpool, I guess it was all worth it. He wasn’t shirtless enough, though. More shirtless men! More, I say!

There’s also plenty of action, and most of it has that kind of weird “2000s-era superhero movie” vibe to it, completely abandoning logic internal or external. There’s Liev Schreiber running on all fours, spine-breaking teleportation interruptions, and wolverine slicing up the blades of a moving helicopter by holding up his claws like a lightsaber.

Despite the copious amounts of action, most of it fails to impress due to cruddy fight choreography, haphazard CGI, and the blood problem. Wolverine’s claws make people bleed. Or they should, at least, and yet there’s like zero pints of red in this movie! I know it’s PG-13, and I’m not saying every superhero movie needs to be Logan, but come on, throw me a freakin’ bone claw here and get a little blood flowing!

But ultimately, even with some good casting and weird action trying to hold it together, X-Men Origins: Wolverine is just kind of boring and cruel. It doesn’t explore Wolverine as a character in any meaningful way considering he was already basically the star of three other X-films, most of the plot is utter nonsense I won’t even begin to describe, and it severely suffers from the prequel syndrome where you know exactly what’s going to happen to most of the characters because you’ve already seen them in subsequent movies. So there is really not a lot of surprise there. People die and you’ll go, “well, yeah. They weren’t in X-Men.” Of all the skippable x-films, this is probably the skippable-est.

Time until initial action starts: ~ 2 minutes

Time until the real action starts: ~ 4 minutes

Big bad baddies: Anyone that doesn’t answer to the name Wolverine.

Best Line: “He’s got his own ass coming out the front of his shirt.”

Best Explosion: Wolverine is inside a barn and the baddies are outside trying to get him. They shoot the barn with a missile and the screen lights up with flames…and then you see Wolverine burst out of the flames on a motorcycle. Mmmm, tasty!

Action Rating: 4 nekkid Hugh Jackmans jumping off a waterfall, out of 5

NOTE: Don’t confuse my action rating with an endorsement. This movie is dumb, but it has a lot of action.

This is the Action Flick Chick, and you’ve just been kicked in the ass!